Mary McCarthy Quotes

Public speaking is the art of diluting a two-minute idea with a two-hour vocabulary.

What a pity it is that there are so many words! Whenever one wants to say anything, three or four ways of saying it run into one's head together and one can't tell which to choose. It is as troublesome and puzzling as choosing a ribbon ... or a husband.

One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understand

The spiritual activity of millennia is deposited in language.

We never say so much as when we do not quite know what we want to say. We need few words when we have something to say, but all the words in all the dictionaries will not suffice when we have nothing to say and want desperately to say it.

Many people talk much, and then very many people talk very much more.

Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.

Of all the words in all languages I know, the greatest concentration is in the English word I.

Language can do what it can’t say.

Language is the most beautiful and destructive thing because it allows you to express yourself, but it totally confuses everything.

The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. That's history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history.

It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.

Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.

Why do we embroider everything we say with special emphasis when all we really need to do is simply say what needs to he said? Of course the fact is that there is very little that needs to be said.

I used to keep a dictionary and work with it and then I realized there are more words that exist in the English language than there are in this dictionary.

Language designed to impress builds a gulf. Language to express builds a bridge.

You live for pretentious metaphors.

Lizzie Harris's debut collection, Stop Wanting, crafts images and lines of such arresting splendor that I am very often driven to joy at the feats of beauty and healing that language is capable of bringing into being.

Japanese is a baby talk - very, very hard to read, very, very, easy to talk. ... A very faint kind of language.

There are things that don't deserve to be said briefly.

Art is a language, an instrument of knowledge, an instrument of communication.

What action could bodies and substances have if they were not named in a further increase of dignity where common nouns become proper nouns?

Be respectful of words. They mean something.

The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.